


when you leave, the sun goes

by SouthSideStory



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gift Fic, Prompt Fill, TLJ concurrent, force skype, slightly canon divergent, the purplest of prose, unsubtle fairy tale allusions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 05:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15308694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/pseuds/SouthSideStory
Summary: Touch is the foundation of love, the bedrock upon which forever-things are built.(What might have happened if Luke hadn't interrupted Ben and Rey as they touched hands.)





	when you leave, the sun goes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LochTayBoatSong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LochTayBoatSong/gifts).



—

**show me, she says. show me my missing pieces, so that i can sew my soul back together and finally feel whole. show me show me show me what i can’t see in the dark.**

—

Her reflection stands before her, and there are countless counterfeit Reys at her back, but she has never been so isolated. Not even when she was scratching tallies on the wall of her rusting AT-AT; not even on the nights when she imagined an island to soothe her fears. The very island she ventured beneath tonight, armed with the only demand that mattered: _Show me my parents. Please._

Perhaps if she was less polite, that mirror would have given her a real answer.

It’s storming outside, the Ahch-To skies opening to pelt her with stinging rain, and by the time Rey makes it back to her hut, her clothes are twice soaked through. She knew cold on Jakku, but those desert nights were arid, not wet, and apparently that makes quite a difference.

She takes off her vest, starts a fire, and sits down on the floor of her hut with a blanket wrapped around her. She’s cold, so cold, and she can’t stop thinking about that mirror. Its fractured glass slowly unclouding, showing her the last thing she wanted to see.

She has no family, and she never will.

It takes Rey a few moments to register the world closing in around her, how the storm outside seems to disappear, giving way only to an echoing tunnel connecting her to Kylo. Ben, maybe. She can’t be so sure who he is anymore.

—

**don’t forget: all shadows have light at their backs.**

—

“I thought I’d find answers here. I was wrong.” Then: “I’d never felt so alone.”

“You’re not alone.”

“Neither are you.”

_(Somewhere in another life, Luke runs through the rain, calling for Rey. But not in this one.)_

“It isn’t too late,” she says.

And maybe this time it’s not.

—

**he never learns the constellations, because he already knows what story the stars have in mind for him. but over enough little millennia, even the stars can change.**

—

Girl. Scavenger. Jedi-to-be. There are many categories to place her in, but now Kylo can only think of her as _Rey_ , because she is impossible to put in a box.

She holds out her hand slowly, and in this infinite, private space he can hear the tremulous note in her breath. Shaking, waiting, wanting.

Her hands are too elegant to belong to a woman who was a slave a week ago, the prettiest of paradoxes. Kylo’s glad that her greater nature shines through, even in such small ways as this. She is meant for more, like him, this girl from nowhere.

He takes off his glove and reaches for her, both unsteady and sure. Then they’re touching, fingertips to fingertips, innocent but intimate, and—

_(“Don’t be afraid,” he told her, not so long ago. “I feel it too.”)_

There is a low roll of thunder outside and a resounding energy inside as two sides of the Force collide, Rey’s presence melding with his own. And he sees everything: the now and the past and the future to come. His own quarters and the stone hut Rey sits in. A barren desert. The impenetrable red of Snoke’s throne room. Rey as she is now, a tear slipping down her cheek; and Rey as a child, being sold for—

_(“Forty credits.”_

_Her father grouses over the blobfish’s price. “She’s a smart girl and a hard worker,” he says. “Surely that counts for something?”_

_Plutt grunts. “If she was so smart and so hard working, you wouldn’t be throwing her away. Forty, and not one credit more.”_

_“Fine,” her mother says. “Forty will do.”_

_It’s a bad deal, and Rey understand it now in a way that she couldn’t have then. Child slaves are worth more than adults. More trainable, more easily broken. But drunks are too desperate to strike smart bargains, and her parents were nothing if not desperate.)_

Rey knows already. Somewhere inside, under the optimism she wears like armor, lies this truth. When the time comes, he won’t even have to tell her.

—

**there is a difference between _alone_ and _alone together_. there is all the difference in the world. **

—

If she goes to Ben, he will turn back to the light.

_(Between the walls and their enemies’ armor and the embers in the air, Rey has never seen so much red. They stand back to back, fighting together instead of against each other. He moves like a monster finally uncaged, wielding his saber with a vengeance she can taste on the back of her own tongue._

_“Please,” Ben says._

_It’s a future as solid as stone and as clear as glass. And although Rey doesn’t know what he’s asking of her, she’s certain that she’ll give it to him.)_

She clasps his hand properly, and her surroundings flicker. Her hut disappears, replaced by a dark, spartan room that is undoubtedly Ben’s. For a moment, she can see exactly where he is, but then she blinks, and she’s back on Ahch-To. His brown eyes widen, and she suspects that the same thing just happened to him.

Her visions have whispered away, but Rey can still feel the warmth of him. This is real, regardless of how far apart they are. After all, what truth could be stronger than one revealed by the Force?

—

**touch is the foundation of love, the bedrock upon which forever-things are built.**

—

They draw so close together that Kylo can feel Rey’s breath on his skin. She lets go of his hand, but only to brush his hair away from his face, her touch achingly gentle. She traces a line down his cheek, then brushes his lips and chin, mapping out every flaw with her fingers, and Kylo closes his eyes against this soft examination.

“No,” she says. “Look at me.”

Kylo is not used to following any orders besides Snoke’s. But Rey, she wants him to _give_ , not submit, and this matters more than he could have known. So he opens his eyes and finds understanding in her gaze. No hate, no judgement. _Monster,_ she called him, but now Rey looks at him like she only sees a man.

“Thank you,” he says.

Rey cants her head, and he notices, not for the first time, that she is prettier scowling than most women are smiling. She touches his scar, following the seam of it, this wound she’d inflicted just days ago.

_(The wind bites his skin, its needle teeth pricking the fresh burn on his face. Death hovers over him, his own grandfather’s lightsaber held in her hand, and Kylo is surprised to find no fear within himself._

Do it _, he thinks, but he doesn’t have the breath to say as much._

_Then the ground opens up between them, and as this violated world collapses, Kylo’s last wish is that if he lives, he wants to see Rey again.)_

“What are you thanking me for?” she asks.

The honest answer—that she’s made him feel something besides misery and anger for the first time in years—is not one that he’s ready to share.

So Kylo deflects.

“Not for slashing open my face.”

Rey pulls her hand back to her chest, her expression so unimpressed that it almost makes him smile.

“Perhaps you should,” she says, voice lofty. “You look roguish now. Before you were too pretty.”

People have been terrified of him for so long that Kylo almost doesn’t recognize her teasing for what it is, but Rey’s blush gives her away.

“You don’t flirt very nicely,” he says.

She shakes her head, gaping. “I’m not flirting with you!”

He does smile then, and nearly laughs. “You are, but I don’t mind.”

Rey looks ready to crawl under a rock and never come out, so he grabs her around her waist and hauls her onto his lap. She scrambles to steady herself, holding onto his shoulders tightly.

Everything around him shivers, rippling like the air on an impossibly hot day, and suddenly he isn’t in his room at all. That stone hut he’d glimpsed earlier has manifested around him, and Kylo doesn’t even know if he’s still aboard the _Supremacy_ at all. Maybe he’s only here now, drawn halfway across the galaxy by Rey’s touch alone.

—

**_here_ and _there_ are not such strangers, but the closer you want them to be, the farther apart they are.**

—

Rey’s bed is small and hard, so she and Ben lie on the floor together, holding hands. Firelight casts flickering shadows across his face, a sight that makes her shiver.

This man was her enemy, and he could be again tomorrow. A few sweet words don’t mean much in the middle of a war. Except, Rey wants to believe in him. It’s in her nature to hope, no matter how high the odds are stacked against her.

“My father always said to never tell him the odds,” Ben whispers, as if he plucked her thoughts right out of her head.

He did, she realizes. She forgot that he could do that so easily.

“Wait. We’re not supposed to be able to use the Force when we’re connected like this. How did you—”

Ben squeezes her hand. “I don’t think those rules apply anymore.”

Rey listens for the echoing that had accompanied his voice before, but it’s gone. Now there’s only the sounds of thunder and rain, Ben’s breathing and her own.

“Are you here?” she asks. “Really here, I mean?”

He’s quiet for a long while, then says, “I don’t know, but I’d like to think so.”

They hold hands all through the night, sharing simple truths and hard ones as the storm outside eases.

“It’s not about finding things that still work,” Rey says, because he asked about a scavenger’s life. “Just about everything on Jakku is garbage, so you don’t look for things that are whole; you look for things that can still be salvaged.”

The fire is dying down, but dawn light shines through the window now, so Rey doesn’t miss Ben’s subtle smile.

“What is it?” she asks.

“No wonder you’re trying to save me,” he says dryly. “You’ve spent your whole life fixing broken things.”

She moves closer, until every part of her is touching some part of him. “Do you truly think that you can’t come back?”

Ben wraps an arm around her, and for the first time in her life, Rey feels small and protected at once.

“How could I?” he asks. “After everything I’ve done.”

“You’re the one who said to let the past die.” Rey draws back just enough to look at him properly. “It doesn’t seem like you’re very good at taking your own advice.”

She wants to say more, to tell him that she sees so much good in him still. That she can feel his light, in constant conflict with the darkness, and all he needs to do is _listen_ —

But then he’s gone.

—

**everything circles back around to its beginning by the end.**

—

Kylo once heard a folk tale about a princess in a coffin. She ate some poisoned fruit—an apple or a pomegranate, he thinks—and it took a prince’s kiss to wake her from her living death.

Rey is far from a sleeping damsel, and he’s never been a prince, despite his royal mother, but that old story comes back to him nonetheless. Rey has delivered herself to him, and as he looks down at her in that escape pod, all he can think of is the princess in the coffin, waiting to be saved.

As soon as they’re alone, he asks, “Why did you come here?”

“Because,” she says, “you’re worth my hope.”

—

**some infinities are smaller than others, but they go on endlessly all the same. or: the briefest moment cradles a lifetime of what-ifs within it.**

—

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a gift for the lovely lochtayboatsong, who donated toward ReyloTrashCompactor's GoFundMe in exchange for this story.
> 
> The title comes from the song "The Best Part" by Paul McDonald and Nikki Reed, which I listened to about a thousand times as I was writing this.


End file.
